Baby, It's Cold Outside

‘’The Winter Evening’’

American Winter Scene  Currier & Ives 

O winter, ruler of the inverted year...

I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem’st,

And dreaded as thou art!...I crown thee king of intimate delights, Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness,

And all the comforts that the lowly roof 

of  undisturb’d retirement, and the hours 

Of long uninterrupted evening, knows.                                                    William Cowper 1785  

The Little Ice Age

Lasting from the early 14th century until the mid-19th century, the ‘Little Ice Age’ was disastrous on a global scale.  From the 1620’s until the 1690’s, longer winters and cooler summers disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests across Europe; the coast of Iceland was so blocked by ice that no ships could dock. Most of the rivers in Europe froze over and ice on the Baltic Sea was thick enough to walk from one side to the other.

Good Vibrations:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmWvR-kdnCo

Going, Going, Gone

The Sixth Extinction 

Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis)

Our envelope, as I have called it, the cultural insulation that separates us from nature, is rather like the window of a lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mirror of our own concerns, including our concern about nature.

                                     

                        

Auroch (Bos taurus primigenius)

As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of its existence. 

Wooly rhino (Coelodonta Antiquitatis)

 But occasionally the mirror turns into a real window through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature that goes along for untold aeons of time without us, seems to have produced us only by accident, and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so
Northrop Frye, Creation & Recreation  

                                                          
                                                                                                            

 Good Reads: The Sixth Extinction  by Richard Leakey

Good Vibrations:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njtM09ki5nY